Speaking out against transgender extremists has made me the most hated man on the internet, writes "Father Ted" creator GRAHAM LINEHAN

Today I am one of the most loathed figures on the internet. My speaking events have been cancelled. I have been sued. The police have visited my home and former friends have turned their backs on me.

Yet I’m the man who wrote the much-loved Father Ted! Why is it that I’ve become so suddenly unpopular? The thought crime for which I have been tried and found guilty is that I believe biological reality exists.

I believe women are females. I believe everyone should be able to present themselves as they wish but that women’s hard-won rights must not be compromised for the benefit of men suffering body dysphoria – which is to say men who feel they are stuck in the wrong body.

Most of all, I believe that gender ideology, in its currently fashionable form, is dangerous, incoherent nonsense.

I believe trans people –those unfortunate enough to suffer body dysphoria – are having their condition exploited and trivialised by abusive, controlling and authoritarian trans rights activists. And I think women and children are suffering because of it.

Worst of all, I say so, loudly. This makes me Public Enemy No 1.

I make my arguments forcefully because I’m concerned, sometimes with humour because I’m a comedy writer and often while cursing, because I’m Irish. It’s the humour they hate most. It’s kryptonite to these activists.

I’m 51 and I’ve never seen anything like the authoritarianism on display, the desperate desire to shut down the conversation. No genuine civil-rights movement advances in secret but this one has as one of its mantras ‘NO DEBATE’.

So, while we are in a world where male sexual offenders in bad wigs assault female prisoners, where rape crisis centres are defunded because they won’t admit men and where a bloke in a full beard tells schoolchildren that he’s a lesbian, we’re informed with venomous aggression that we may not talk about any of it.

No debate? Oh, there’s going to be a debate all right.

The popular opinion among my detractors is that I’m cherry-picking negative stories to mask a hatred of trans people. In fact, I first came to this debate because I saw women being bullied, losing their jobs and suffering the most intense online harassment I’d ever seen, and I wanted to stand beside them.

Also, as a writer, I couldn’t watch as one of the most important words in the English language, the word ‘woman’, was being changed against the will of those whom it defined.

Suddenly, everywhere you looked, women were being erased, insulted or endangered. Amnesty referring to pregnant women as ‘pregnant people’. Productions of The Vagina Monologues closing because they excluded ‘women who don’t have vaginas’. Women’s toilets disappearing from public life – even though they were introduced to ensure that women could have a public life.

Worst of all, I saw the lack of compassion or empathy for the vulnerable women who are often at the sharp end of the new Gender Theocracy.

The four women attacked in prison by a male sex offender in 2018 (who everyone had to call ‘Karen’ or they were committing a hate crime) are four women too many.

Women in prison often have a history of abuse at the hands of men. Whatever they’ve done, they are entitled to safety from the type of men who helped put them there.

Rational people – and that includes rational trans people – are dismayed by those who have now taken over trans activism.

Body dysphoria is no longer seen as central or even necessary for those who decide to adopt a so-called trans identity.

To see just how elastic and meaningless the word ‘trans’ has become, one only has to look at the definition adopted by the Stonewall lobby group: ‘Trans people may describe themselves using one or more of a wide variety of terms, including (but not limited to) transgender, transsexual, gender-queer (GQ), gender-fluid, non-binary, gender-variant, crossdresser, genderless, agender, nongender, third gender, bi-gender, trans man, trans woman, trans masculine, trans feminine and neutrois.’

Neutrois, I discovered, literally just means ‘androgynous’. So androgynous people are trans. That’ll be news to Bake Off presenter Noel Fielding.

Under Stonewall’s definition, everyone is trans, and no one is. A cross-dresser such as banker Philip Bunce, who adopts the female persona ‘Pippa’ for only a few days every week, nevertheless receives the honour of being named by the Financial Times as one of its top 100 women in business.

This was seen as progress, a step forward for women. In fact, it is an insult to women and to those suffering from body dysphoria.

In order to maintain the fantasy that our sex is unconnected to our bodies, the truth must be bent and beaten in the fire of academic language. That is why trans activists talk about sex being ‘assigned at birth’ – an abuse of language, if ever I heard one.

Is the sex of a newborn ‘assigned’ by a capricious midwife? Of course not. Rather it is observed and recorded as a matter of fact.

‘Assigned’ is one of the more successful hijackings of English achieved by gender ideologues, yet you will hear it parroted across many organisations from the NHS to the BBC – the sort of institution where you really would expect people to know better.

Before I knew how toxic trans rights activism was, I wrote an episode of my Channel 4 sitcom The IT Crowd with a trans character. The response was more venomous than I was used to, but as bad as it was, at least I was allowed to write it. That was in 2013.

In 2020, such an episode would never air. And that is because the first generation who didn’t go out to play have grown up to become clones of Mary Whitehouse. The new puritans.

I am not new to outrage. There was fury on the part of some when we first released Father Ted but the executives we had were made of strong stuff and ignored the attacks. The same goes for The IT Crowd, Brass Eye, Black Books, and I guess a few comedies I haven’t worked on.

I’m worried we’re entering an era of pre-chewed, prissy art that offends no one. But it’s not comedy writers who are the victims of all this: it is women who are the real casualties.

Gender ideology is a disaster for women. They are expected to make room for men in their changing rooms and their safe spaces.

They are being robbed of the language to describe their reality by unintelligible academic ‘gender experts’, by teenagers encouraging each other online, by parents who are profoundly mistaken, and by well-meaning people who, confused by the ever-changing terminology, still believe they are defending what used to be called transsexuals.

All these forces working together are, whether they know it or not, providing a smokescreen for fetishists, conmen and misogynists to pursue their own agenda.

In years to come, we will look back at this scandal, at the ruined bodies, the confused crime statistics, the weakening of safeguarding and the rollback of women’s rights and wonder how it was left to go on for so long.

SOURCE 







Why I’m anti-woke

Woke authoritarians are a threat to freedom and equality.

During 2019’s Last Night of the Proms, the audience was treated to a rendition of Daniel Kidane’s latest composition, ‘Woke’. Kidane had written the piece because he was concerned that the word had veered from its earlier definition – that is, to be ‘alert to injustice in society, especially racism’. This was how the word was understood when it originated in the various black civil-rights movements of the 20th century. If this is all it means to be woke, then count me in.

Unfortunately, over the past few years the term has been appropriated and sloganised by the cult of social justice. ‘Woke’ is no longer simply a matter of standing up to racism, but is irrevocably connected to the authoritarian mindset of the identitarian left. Rather than confront bad ideas through discussion, debate, ridicule and protest, those who self-identify as ‘woke’ would sooner intimidate their detractors into silence through what has become known as ‘cancel culture’. More insidiously, they have sought to empower the state and strengthen hate-speech laws, which curb individual freedom. They do all this in the belief that theirs is a righteous cause, but their illiberal actions ultimately bolster the very ideas they purport to despise.

Moreover, this monomaniacal need to expose an ever-expanding set of ‘phobias’ in society means that they end up detecting prejudice even where it does not exist. In the absence of evidence of racism the woke have a habit of simply concocting it; hence the continual emphasis on ‘unconscious bias’, ‘white privilege’ and ‘institutional power structures’. Such ideas have germinated over many years in academia – particularly in the postmodern branches of critical theory – and have since seeped into the mainstream.

This is why the public is routinely confronted with absurd articles in the media grounded in an extreme form of intersectionality. One, for instance, claims that white women are ‘evil’, another that white DNA is an ‘abomination’. Barely a day goes by without some frenzied denunciation of a movie or a television series for its lack of diversity and positive representation, as though the function of the arts is to send a message that accords with identitarian values.

Few members of the public are entirely familiar with the jargon (‘cisgender’, ‘mansplaining’, ‘toxic masculinity’), but are assured nonetheless that the premises are indisputable. There’s a very good reason why the Catholic Church resisted translating the Bible into the vernacular for so long. Those in power are always threatened when the plebeians start thinking for themselves and asking difficult questions.

Some commentators have recently raised concerns that ‘woke’ has been weaponised by the far right as a slur against anti-racist campaigners. Afua Hirsch, for instance, has claimed in the Guardian that anyone using the word is ‘likely to be a right-wing culture warrior angry at a phenomenon that lives mainly in their imagination’. This strikes me as particularly odd, given the Guardian’s own frequent use of the word, including in headlines such as ‘Can a woke makeover win Barbie and Monopoly new fans?’ and ‘My search for Mr Woke: a dating diary’. Perhaps Hirsch’s colleagues are further to the right than is generally supposed.

The effect of the woke movement has been to cultivate a climate in which good people feel unable to speak their minds for fear of being misinterpreted and mischaracterised – wilfully or otherwise. Activists have managed to restrict the Overton Window to such an extent that much-needed discussions – such as how to deal with the challenges raised by gender self-identification – are often avoided entirely.

As Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay note in their forthcoming book, Cynical Theories, ‘many people are wondering what’s happening, how we got here, what it all means, and how (and how soon) we can fix it and restore some common ground, charity and reason’. Yet to make this point openly is to risk being decried in the most damaging terms. Indeed, the labels ‘racist’, ‘misogynist’, ‘homophobe’, ‘transphobe’ and ‘fascist’ – extremely serious allegations that should only be used when there is incontrovertible evidence to support them – are now so promiscuously applied that they have lost their impact. This not only provides cover for the far right, but also actively promotes the worst people in society by creating an illusion of widespread crypto-fascism.

The bullying tactics of the woke were never likely to be persuasive, and have left many feeling resentful. This accounts for the collective sigh of relief that followed the actor Laurence Fox’s appearance on Question Time, in which he openly challenged these new orthodoxies. He pointed out that many are frustrated with being told that we live in a racist country, when studies repeatedly confirm that ours is one of the most tolerant countries on the planet. As Fox said, we need to be united in our opposition to genuine racism, not conjuring enemies out of thin air.

The explanation for such overzealous behaviour probably lies in the woke movement’s rehabilitation of racialised thinking. It regards people primarily in terms of group identity determined by skin colour, and only secondarily through their qualities as individuals. The ideal of colour-blindness, a beautiful notion that emphasises the equality of all human beings, is itself now routinely dismissed as racist.

If one were to deliberately construct an ideology intended to foster racial division and popularise the objectives of the far right, one could hardly do better than the social-justice movement in its current manifestation. It is for this reason that Pluckrose and Lindsay adopt a capitalised form of ‘Social Justice’ in their book to distinguish from the noble principles of ‘social justice’, the former inadvertently working against the aims of the latter.

This is also why Ellie Mae O’Hagan’s recent article for the Guardian – in which she describes the ‘anti-woke’ backlash as being in direct opposition to social liberalism – is so utterly wrongheaded, however well intentioned. Most of us who oppose wokeness do so precisely because it represents a direct threat to social liberalism. As I have argued previously on spiked, identitarians on the right and left have an interdependent relationship; each one nourishes and sustains the other.

If we are serious about true social justice we should take the woke to task for their ongoing trivialisation of important causes such as anti-racism, gender equality and rights for sexual minorities. It is the responsibility of true progressives to reassert the centrality of open debate as the cornerstone of any free society. In short, we need to robustly defend the liberal values that woke activists have foolishly rejected as forms of institutional oppression.

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Mike Bloomberg Suggests Uneducated Midwest Rubes Are Just Too Stupid for Trans Bathrooms

Back in 2016, former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg made elitist and demeaning comments about Midwestern rubes who are too uneducated to support transgender bathroom access. The remarks, which resurfaced on Friday, illustrate the patronizing attitude many pro-transgender activists have toward those who dare to disagree with the view that gender identity overrides biological sex. Ironically, transgender activists were triggered by how the former mayor insulted the Midwesterners who disagree with them.

Speaking to an audience at Oxford University and addressing the Brexit vote, Bloomberg said, "We, the intelligentsia, the people who could make it into this room, we believe a lot of things in terms of equality and protecting individual rights that make no sense to the vast bulk of people."

"They are not opposed to you having some rights, but there's a fundamental disconnect between us believing the rights of the individual come first and the general belief around the world, I think it's fair to say, that the rights of society comes first," Bloomberg continued.

Then came the geographical snobbery.

"If you want to know if somebody is a good salesman, give him the job of going to the Midwest and picking a town and selling to that town the concept that some man wearing a dress should be in a locker room with their daughter. If you can sell that, you can sell anything," he said.

"They just look at you and they say, 'What on Earth are you talking about?' And you say, 'Well this person identifies his or her gender as different than what’s on their birth certificate.' And they say, 'What do you mean? You’re either born this or you’re born that.'"

These remarks managed to trigger transgender activists while insulting both Midwesterners and those who believe biological sex takes precedence over gender identity.

Charlotte Clymer, a biological male who identifies as a woman and campaigns for transgenderism, called Bloomberg's remarks "deeply disgusting and disqualifying."

"Trans people were living openly in the Midwest long before Bloomberg woke up one morning and decided to start buying elections," Clymer added.

Activists like Clymer objected to the idea that biological men who identify as women and use the women's restroom should be referred to as "some man." In their eyes, such a person is a woman because he identifies as a woman, regardless of his male DNA, the effects of testosterone on his body from the womb onward, and the fact that his body developed differently from that of a woman.

Yet Bloomberg appeared to suggest that any disagreement with transgender ideology comes from a lack of education and sophistication. He insulted an entire geographic region of the country — the Midwest — by associating it with a lack of education and sophistication.

Yet a broad coalition of conservatives, feminists, and lesbians have allied against this ideology, for a whole host of reasons.

Feminists have condemned the transgender movement as a "men's rights movement" since it involves biological men forcing their way into women's spaces. A group of British lesbians tried to separate the LGB from the T, but eventually settled on removing the L from the acronym instead. "Let the L Out" accused the transgender movement of promoting "rape culture" because it "promotes the right of heterosexual males who 'identify' as women and lesbians (despite most of them still retaining their male genitals) over the right of lesbians to choose their sexual partners. This new 'queer' LGBT politics thus coerces lesbians to accept the pen*s as a female organ and promotes heterosexual intercourse between male and female as a form of lesbian sex."

It is very rational to oppose the transgender movement on the bathroom issue, specifically. After Target infamously opened its women's restrooms and changing rooms to biological men who identify as women, voyeurs across the country reportedly took advantage of the policy. In 2017, a 5-year-old boy allegedly sexually assaulted a 5-year-old girl in a girl's bathroom — after getting in by claiming he was "non-binary." Transgender provocateur Jessica Yaniv has allegedly used his transgender identity to prey on girls in bathrooms.

Bloomberg does need to apologize, not just for his smug attitude or his politically incorrect phrasing, but also for promoting a movement that puts girls and women in danger. Sadly, he is far from alone among Democratic presidential candidates on this issue — and the others have become savvier in their pandering to this dangerous movement.

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70% of refugees in Australia are parasites

The federal government plans to set up English classes in refugee camps to give potential immigrants a better shot at getting a job when they get to Australia.

Acting Immigration Minister and Minister for Population Alan Tudge has decried a link between unacceptably high rates of unemployment amongst refugees and a lack of English skills.

'Long-term welfare dependence is debilitating for anyone, be they a refugee, long-term citizen or anyone else. We have to do better,' Mr Tudge will say in a speech at the Menzies Research Centre in Melbourne, The Australian reported on Friday.

'Data shows that when identifying reasons for finding it difficult to get a job, close to 60 per cent of humanitarian entrants said 'my English isn't good enough yet'.'

A trial of English-language classes in overseas camps to upskill refugees before they arrive in Australia is due to begin on July 1.

More than 70 per cent of refugees are unemployed a year after arriving in Australia, the government says.

SOURCE  

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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